Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you’ve probably noticed a new social network emerge in the form of Pinterest.

Founded back in 2009 by Ben Silberman and Evan Sharp. The social bookmarking site remained as an invite-only network up until August 2012. Despite it’s initial restricted access, Pinterest shot to prominence when a reports by ComScore found it had reached 10 million U.S. monthly unique visitors faster than any standalone site ever.

Another stat for businesses to take note of is that Pinterest generated more referral traffic for businesses than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined. So what is this new social network that has suddenly popped up? Here’s a run down of the basics that you need to know, plus some extra statistics you might be interested in.

What is Pinterest? The Essentials

Pinterest is just like one of those cork bulletin boards you set up at home or the office for reminders and photos. Much like its offline equivalent, Pinterest lets you “pin” images and videos from your favorite websites onto a virtual pinboards.

Unlike other social bookmarking such as Delicious – Pinterest takes the visual content of a website you’re bookmarking instead of just displaying a text link, which has been one of the main reasons for its explosive growth.

Pinning and Repinning

A pin is basically an image or video you’ve added onto the site via the Pin It button or manually uploaded through Pinterest.

However before adding a pin to your account, you’re prompted to assign it to one of the boards you’ve made. Boards are essentially a way to categorize your pins, to make browsing more pleasant. A board can focus on any topic, such as Books Worth Reading, Social Media Infographics, or Cool Products.

On the other hand, you‘ll also find pins posted by other that you like, which is where repinning comes handy. It works much like Twitter’s Retweet, and allows you to quickly add images to your board and share them with your followers.

Who is using Pinterest?

Much has been said about who’s using Pinterest, with a lot of folks shunning the social network because they think it’s just for women.

But while the biggest demographic for Pinterest are women aged 25-34, and represents a grand opportunity for businesses catering to the female market.  The UK market represents a more even divide between men and women with 56% vs. 44% respectively.

So does this mean that Pinterest is exclusively for women? Not necessarily. When we consider that the social network was invite-only up until August 2012, and how the UK shows an almost equal divide between the genders – we can expect more men to gradually join Pinterest when it becomes less of an unknown entity.

For more information about Pinterest users check out these interesting statistics:

  1. 50% of all users have children (Search Engine Journal)
  2. 28.1 percent have an annual household income of $100,000. (Ultralinx)
  3. Users average a little less than 17 minutes on Pinterest (AllTwitter)
  4. 57% of Pinterest users interact with food-related content, the #1 category of content (Compete.com)
  5. Pinterest buyers spend more money, more often, and on more items than any of the other top 5 social media sites (comScore)
  6. Users in U.S. follow an average of 9.3 retail companies (Shop.org)
  7. Moms are 61% more likely to visit Pinterest than the average American (Nielsen)

So there you have it, a quick guide to what Pinterest is. And in case you want a visual representation we’ve included an infographic courtesy of the folks at Infographic Labs. Also don’t forget to follow Cuutio on Pinterest as well.

what is pinterest

Was the article worth sharing?

Subscribe to the cuutio newsletter

It includes insights and tips about marketing technologies and digital marketing

You might be interested in these articles, too